Modern user devices provide an increasingly wide array of options for users to communicate with each other, as more and more communication applications (apps) are developed for such devices. This applies in particular to mobile devices, such as smartphones, as the range of mobile apps developed for popular mobile platforms has grown significantly in recent years. Such applications include, for example, basic messaging applications that allow users to conduct conversations in real-time via text exchange, multimedia messaging applications that extend this to the exchange of media content, such as images emojis/emoticons, gifs, short audio/video clips etc.; VoIP (Voice over IP) applications that allow real-time audio and video calls to be conducted over (primarily) the Internet; social media apps; and dating apps, among others.
Dating apps, and in particular mobile dating apps, have become significantly more popular in recent years. Whilst so-called “online dating” has been around for some time, historically this was seen something of a niche activity. However, though newer dating apps, such as Tinder, online dating is becoming increasingly mainstream. A key driver in this has been the availability of dating services on smartphones. Not only does this provide users with significantly more flexibility in terms of where and when they can choose to engage in online dating activity, but certain mobile dating apps have also been extremely effective when it comes to harnessing the functionality of modern smartphones—in particular, their location awareness and advanced touchscreen functions (one example being Tinder with its location-based matching and “swipe right/swipe left” interface).